Review: ‘Woolf Works’ by the Royal Ballet

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‘‘Woolf Works,’’ at the Royal Ballet, is set to an original score by Max Richter and based on three Virginia Woolf novels: ‘‘Mrs. Dalloway,’’ ‘‘Orlando’’ and ‘‘The Waves.’’CreditTristram Kenton/Royal Opera House

On Monday night came Mr. McGregor’s “Woolf Works” — another story ballet of a kind, and his first full-length piece for the Royal Ballet. Set to an original score by Max Richter and based on three Virginia Woolf novels — “Mrs. Dalloway,” “Orlando” and “The Waves” — the commission has been the subject of much ballet-world speculation. Mr. McGregor, the Royal Ballet’s resident choreographer since 2006, is known for his knotty, abstract pieces, full of startling, extreme movement and conceptual content.

Could he, the British media wondered, do justice to the literary genius of Woolf, who committed suicide at the age of 59, in 1941, after writing some of the finest lyrical prose works in the English language? There is a reason, more than one writer hinted darkly, why it hasn’t been done. (Actually it has; in 2001, William Forsythe created “Woolf Phrase,” inspired by “Mrs. Dalloway.”)

Whether or not Mr. McGregor has done justice to Woolf, he has created a compelling trilogy of works that together form a resonant, layered meditation on time and memory.

Wisely, he hasn’t tried to fashion a linear story ballet. Its three acts each draw from one of the three novels, and they are linked by the figure of Woolf herself, incarnated by Alessandra Ferri, in the opening and closing sections. But narrative ideas permeate the texture of the dance; whether or not you have read these books, small stories run through every moment.

As Mr. McGregor already demonstrated in his first full-length ballet, the 2011 “L’Anatomie de la Sensation” created for the Paris Opera Ballet, this way of treating narrative (not unlike Woolf’s own) suits his quick, associative sensibilities far better than the straightforward approach he deployed in “Raven Girl.”

But Mr. McGregor creates a dramatic and emotional arc much more successfully in “Woolf Works” than he did in “L’Anatomie,” and he also uses a broader physical vocabulary to evoke the mood and content of each part. The ballet begins with the sound of Woolf’s voice (the only extant recording), speaking about language, as words file across a scrim onstage, shrinking into illegible patterns and then into a pointillist portrait of the writer. Behind the scrim we see Ms. Ferri, a Royal Ballet principal early in her career who went on to have a major international career before retiring in 2007. She returned to performance two years ago. But anyone (guilty!) who thought Ms. Ferri, now 52, would be declaiming dramatically in a long robe à la Anne Bancroft in “The Turning Point,” was mistaken.

Instead she is on point, febrile, beautifully pliant, and technically assured as she dances first with Federico Bonelli, a kind and tender husband figure, then with her younger self (Beatriz Stix-Brunell) and the young girl she once loved (Francesca Hayward, wonderful). The dancers move between huge mobile frames (by the design studio Ciguë) that look like bookends, upon which grainy footage of London wartime life is projected.

Mr. McGregor sticks to a restrained classical vocabulary, creating tender, lyrical dances that evoke the giddiness of youthful love, and, later, the anguish of mental pain, when Ms. Ferri is partnered by Edward Watson, hollow-eyed as the traumatized soldier Septimus Warren Smith. Mr. Watson, long a central figure in Mr. McGregor’s Royal Ballet work, is a tragic figure here, but it is Ms. Ferri, with her large dark eyes and burning inwardness, who conjures much of the poetry and drama of this act (titled “I Now, I Then”).

In Part Two, “Becomings,” based on “Orlando,” Mr. McGregor reverts to a more characteristic style and aesthetic. Twelve dancers are dressed in gold outfits (by Moritz Junge) that, in a nod to the novel’s time-traveling narrative, reference Elizabethan costume. With arrow-sharpness, they hurtle into the hyperkinetic, body buckling, counterpointed movement that often characterizes Mr. McGregor’s physical vocabulary, accompanied by the propulsive rhythms of Mr. Richter’s score. The dancing frequently recalls the off-axis, heart-pounding extrapolations of ballet technique in Mr. Forsythe’s early works, particularly in a showstopping pas de deux of astounding, attenuated extensions for Natalia Osipova and Mr. Watson.

“Tuesday,” the third section of the ballet, opens with a recording of Woolf’s suicide note (read with limpid simplicity by Gillian Anderson). Squawking gulls and high-pitched children’s voices (the sound design is by Chris Ekers) are heard over slow piano chords as Ms. Ferri moves among a large ensemble, a video of the sea (by Ravi Deepres) moving in the slowest of slow motion overhead. Themes of “The Waves” — childhood, the passage of time, the cycle of life — are suggested with remarkable economy until finally Mr. Bonelli gently lays Ms. Ferri down, then retreats with the others into the darkness that awaits her.

“Woolf Works” isn’t perfect: “Becomings” is a bit of an overload, exits and entrances are often perfunctory, and Mr. Richter’s music frequently veers into cinematic manipulativeness. But its virtues shine too: Ms. Ferri’s central role, the stupendous lighting by Lucy Carter and Mr. McGregor’s operatically ambitious vision. Too often, ballet suffers from willful self-inhibition; an inability to look beyond its own conventions. That’s not the case here. Mr. McGregor has thought big, and he has created a work that is entertaining, absorbing, not always easy, and occasionally contentious. That’s the (Woolfian) spirit.

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